Permission issues while running mr-jobs

Hello,
I have set up a 3 node hadoop cluster (using HDP 1.1). Namenode is being run as hdfs user and the jobtracker is being run as mapred user (both belong to supergroup). I am currently trying to run a MR job as root and it gives me the following error :

This error arises when the mr job tries to write into the /tmp/hadoop-mapred/mapred/system directory. This directory has permission 700. To overcome this error I tried setting permissions of this directory to 700. But the hadoop framework keeps complaining and tells me that I have to set the permission of this directory back to 700.